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Learn all about vRealize Log Insight in under 90 minutes

This post is aimed towards anyone who does a lot of Log Analysis. In this post I showcased the capabilities of VMware vRealize Log Insight. This will enable you to confidently utilize this tool to not only analyze the diverse logs that you can think of but also visualize the patterns and much more. So, if you are a hands on person who loves to do root cause analysis, or want to solve that nagging performance issue, then this post is for you.

Introduction

To troubleshoot software related issues your only friend are logs. Every software developer some or other logging mechanism so that later on you can troubleshoot any issue. If something crashes you go ahead and look into the logs to find out what went wrong. But log analysis is not only limited to crashing of software. If there is any performance issue, you analyze the logs. Some security breach happens, you audit the logs for any clue. So every organization has some ways to store logs from different sources. Traditionally a syslog server was utilized for this purpose.

In the initial days when number of servers were less, it was easy to maintain and manage the logs. But as virtualization became popular, there was an explosion of virtual machines. Organizations runs thousands of virtual machines, but number of people managing those servers has not increased accordingly. This is because virtualization increases efficiency and admin to server ratio has increased dramatically. This increase of virtual servers has also led to tremendous increase in logs. So now maintaining and auditing those logs is a nightmare. This is where log management & analyzer tools help.

Why vRealize Log Insight?

VMware vRealize Log Insight is one of the best if not the best tools available to manage and analyze any type of log. Underlying it runs a syslog server, so that anything which can send log to a syslog server can forward logs to this tool. But on top of that unstructured data, it runs it’s intelligent engine to analyze that data and bring structure to it. It uses machine learning to understand the pattern and gives a stunning visual representation to that data.

Typically in traditional environment if I had to analyze logs for root cause analysis, I would find error in a log file, then note the time stamp and then find in other log files what was happening at that time. In Log Insight, since the pattern is understood by the intelligent logic, I can query the logs for particular patterns. It’s like querying a database for some information.

Use cases of vRealize Log Insight:

Provided below are the typical use cases for vRealize Log Insight:

Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis

Follow the trail from vRealize Operations Manager to logs to get to root cause to an observed problem

Identify the needle in the haystack in real time when troubleshooting a problem

Monitoring

Monitor metrics and events (performance & change) that are visible only in logs

Identify problems proactively, ensure SLAs and comply to IT policies

Unstructured Data Warehouse

Collect all the data in one place without the need for custom parsing, transformation of data

Get full visibility across all your IT environment from a single place

Topics covered
Given below is the list of the topics covered in the session:

Why vRealize Log Insight

Overview

Integration & Extensibility

Architecture

Machine Learning

Performance

Playing with API

As always live demo is provided throughout the session to showcase the information provided in the slides.

This video is aimed towards anyone who does a lot of Log Analysis. In this video I showcased the capabilities of VMware vRealize Log Insight. This will enable you to confidently utilize this tool to not only analyze the diverse logs that you can think of but also visualize the patterns and much more. So, if you are a hands on person who loves to do root cause analysis, or want to solve that nagging performance issue, then this video is for you.